American Slaves in Tripoli City
I know not what will become of the crew; I suspect very few will ever see home again.
—COMMODORE EDWARD PREBLE
UNLIKE THE OFFICERS, THE crewmen of the Philadelphia on the evening of Bainbridge’s surrender were given nothing to eat. They spent a miserable restless night in an outdoor courtyard. William Ray wrote that every clank, every creak set fear that the guards would come to take some of them away to be auctioned. Sleeping aboard ship was cramped and warm in swaying hammocks; that night, hungry, scared men in damp clothes slept on cold hard tile.
At 8 A.M., an effeminate, wrinkled, hunched old man suddenly entered the courtyard, banged his staff three times on the ground, and ululated in victory (“bu-bu-bu-bu” it sounded to Private Ray). It was the holy marabout. Since Bashaw Yussef was convinced the marabout had cast spells to beach the Philadelphia, he rewarded him with a very early glimpse of the new slaves. (Yussef’s faith in the man’s advice ran so deep that he once borrowed pig shit from the American consulate to mix into the royal horses’ feed to try to stop a fatal distemper.)
The marabout hobbled up to inspect the Americans; his face showed utter disdain for these Christian prisoners. Were some men being selected to die? To depart Tripoli? After long hesitation, the holy man picked the only black sailor of the crew and ordered him to follow. (Days later, he turned up as a royal cook.)
The rest of the prisoners were then surprised to discover that they were allowed to wander around inside the castle. After twenty-plus hours without food, they approached the Neapolitan slaves and tried to bargain for anything to eat but were told that all that was available was “Aquadiente,” a very strong date palm liquor. Some of the desperate men—despite the chilly weather—traded their jackets or shirts for a bottle. Others, who had succeeded in hiding a few coins, were conned into paying four times the going rate.
The guards reherded the men into another courtyard. As the harbor guns blasted out a chest-beating huzzah of victory, Bashaw Yussef and his admiral, Murad Rais, arrived to interrogate the prisoners. The Americans observed that both men had full beards, wore turbans and billowy pants, and carried curved daggers. They soon heard Yussef speaking Arabic and Italian, but they were stunned when Murad addressed them in English with a fine Scottish brogue. Forty-two-year-old Murad Rais was born Peter Lyle in Perth, Scotland; he had a decade earlier been chief mate of an English ship, Hampden, but after being twice accused of embezzling, he had jumped ship in Tripoli harbor. To gain the protection of the Bashaw, he had converted to Islam the same day and had been immediately circumcised in a rushed ceremony and clothed in Barbary finery. He had taken the Moslem name of a great sixteenth-century corsair, one who had hounded the Pope’s own flagship and terrorized even the Atlantic. Murad was a rinigado, and he eventually became admiral of Tripoli and married the Bashaw’s daughter. (British records indicate that Lyle had apparently left behind a Christian wife and five children in Wapping Old Stairs in London.) He was described as a “slight” man, of “indifferent morals,” with a blondish beard, a foul temper, and an above-average thirst for hard liquor. Reports of his drunken, violent behavior—such as beating servants or cursing strangers—often bobbed up in consular reports. “Hang the d-mned villain if you catch him!” William Eaton once wrote. “Give him a drumhead court martial, and just about enough time to pray God’s mercy on his soul!”
Murad Rais, the former Scot and elfin Moor, conducted the interrogation. He began abruptly: “Do you think your captain is a coward or traitor?” The men in gruff unison responded, “Neither.” Murad/Lyle pressed it: “Who with a frigate of forty-four guns, and three hundred men, would strike his colours to one solitary gun-boat?” According to Private Ray, some of the crewmen explained that after throwing the guns overboard, the officers decided the Philadelphia could not defend itself and would be surrounded and cut to pieces. Murad laughed and said there was no need to throw the guns over because the Americans had only to wait till nightfall when high tide would float the ship free.
Murad the Scot—who seemed to have already had a rum or two—ranted on about the cowardice and stupidity of Bainbridge. The admiral of Tripoli ended with the infuriating claim that the Philadelphia had already floated free in the harbor.
The crewmen looked at each other in disbelief. That meant if they had fought a few more hours till darkness, they almost certainly would have escaped. This was stunning news, if true.
Captain Bainbridge, who was allowed to walk on the terrace of the diplomatic house, would contend in numerous letters that the Philadelphia did not float free until forty hours after beaching. Private Ray, who talked to local sailors, disagreed.
Until now, no independent account has been available. During the early 1800s, Holland was under the dominion of Napoleon and was called République Batave. The National Archives in Amsterdam have recently yielded a long overlooked series of letters by Antoine Zuchet, consul in Tripoli for République Batave, delivering a fresh diary of events. “The sea wasn’t choppy and the bottom was sandy . . . not a single cannonball of the corsairs reached [the Philadelphia] and no one dared approach it. What further verifies the misconduct of the Americans is that the frigate during that same night floated free without any rescue efforts. Panic must have blinded these people.”
Zuchet, a generally fair-minded observer, concluded: “What can possibly justify not waiting till the last possible moment to surrender and not negotiating terms of surrender?”
Zuchet was surprised that Captain Bainbridge and the American officers simply didn’t understand the unusual nature of Barbary warfare. In a pitched battle between the English ships of Lord Nelson and the French ships of Napoleon, sinking the other’s vessels signals a great victory. But on the Barbary Coast, nationalistic rah-rah fell on deaf ears. The attackers clearly chose not to try to sink the Philadelphia. They much preferred to keep alive the hope of capturing the warship intact, along with the men and valuables aboard.
In the courtyard, Murad and Yussef now told the American prisoners they expected to convert the potent Philadelphia to Islam, as it were, and have it lead the Tripoli fleet. Murad immediately claimed command; Yussef, listening to the marabout’s advice, planned to rename it: Gift of Allah.
Yussef directed questions in Italian about America’s military to Murad, who in turn translated them to the crewmen. The American sailors shamelessly exaggerated. Yussef, tired of the hyperbole, asked if there were any skilled men, such as blacksmiths and carpenters, among the crew. Several men raised their hands, and Yussef informed them that if they were willing, they would be paid to work for him. The prisoners were now even more baffled as to what Barbary slavery would be like.
Murad and Yussef departed, and soon after, the 270 crewmen were marched through byways so narrow two loaded camels could barely pass abreast to the castle’s main gate. They exited into the old city and were herded to a run-down warehouse, full of sacks of grain, lumber, and assorted rubbish. The overseers ordered them to haul everything outside. Just like the boatswain’s mates on the ship, the overseers beat the slaggards.
Ray estimated the dimensions of their new prison to be fifty feet by twenty feet, with a twenty-five-foot-high roof. Three shafts of daylight illuminated the gloomy place, one from a small skylight and the other two from barred windows. The men soon discovered that, just like aboard ship, there wasn’t enough space for all of them to lie down at once. Quick calculations reveal that of the one thousand square feet, each of the 270 prisoners would have less than four square feet in which to stand or curl up.
Finally, after twenty-six hours without food, the men were each fed one small white loaf of bread. They were then ordered to march single file into the prison so they could be counted; upon re-entering, they were instructed to doff their hats to the head jailor, Abdallah, a bushy-bearded Moor, whom the men quickly dubbed “Captain Blackbeard.” Some prisoners preferred braying to hat-doffing.
The following morning and every morning afterward, the American sailors learned the new rhythm of their lives as slaves on the coast of Barbary. The overseers—from a crooked-legged kindly old Greek nicknamed Bandy to a fierce rod-swinging Tripoli native, Red-Jacket—woke the men just before dawn and quickly parceled them out for various tasks, from hauling pig iron ballast out of the stinking hold of the Philadelphia to the far more pleasant job of carrying a cauldron to a harem. (Ray marveled: While the women in the streets were “muffled up in blankets, which conceal their faces and shapes except one eye,” the women of the harem “were fantastically wrapped in loose robes of striped silk; their arms, necks and bosoms bare, their eyelids stained round the edges with black, their hair braided, turned up . . . with a broad tinsel fillet. They had three or four rings in each ear as large in circumference as a dollar.”)
Despite all the harsh tales they had heard about slavery in Barbary, they were surprised to discover that when the overseers that day couldn’t find enough tasks for 270 men, the unassigned were allowed to wander around the city, so long as they returned to the prison at sundown. Christians and Jews ran taprooms, and anyone who had a coin or something of value could buy date palm liquor or some other alcoholic drink.
The second evening of slave life, a handful of sailors returned drunk to the barracks. Captain Blackbeard ordered the bastinado, that preferred North African punishment. The men’s feet were twirled in the rope, their bare soles lifted and exposed, as the overseer whacked them with a date palm tree limb, about three feet long like a “walking stick . . . hard and very heavy.” The next morning the punished men, who could hardly walk, were forced to do their labors while dragging twenty-pound chains at each ankle.
Hunger also remained a constant nagging annoyance. They were fed once a day, at noon. Each man, working often from sunup to sundown, received two twelve-ounce loaves of black sour bread, made of poorly ground flour chocked with unchewable stalks and chaff. And each night at lockup, the men fought in a mad scramble for floor space to sleep and often wound up sprawled all over one another. Fastidious Private Ray preferred to doze sitting up.
Over the next week, the men—running errands, doing tasks—also began to gather a sense of Tripoli. The city itself, Ray observed, rose up from a lush coastal plain of gardens and endless rows of date palms. The stone houses were cobbled together, built and rebuilt, on the ruins of preceding civilizations such as Greek and Roman; a vegetable market of squatting sellers now occupied the Triumphal Arch of Marcus Aurelius. Thick high medieval walls ringed the entire land side of the city; three heavily guarded gates opened at sunrise and closed at sunset. The bulbous domes of a handful of mosques defied the monotony of white flat-roofed terraced houses, while the minarets, where strong-voiced muezzins called the faithful to prayer, stood like exclamation points of faith. Perched at the highest point of the city overlooking the harbor, the Bashaw’s walled castle enclosed a maze of salons and rooms; from the outside, the castle was a nondescript mishmash, but inside, it was ornate, with colorful tiles setting off pious calligraphy, and elaborate carpets quieting footfall.
To Western eyes, such as Ray’s, Tripoli appeared like a page out of the Arabian Nights. Camels turned the city’s flour mill. Wealthy turbaned men congregated daily at the centre-ville coffee house to smoke six-foot-long pipes and drink coffee while slaves fanned away flies. The Bashaw’s dinner table was nine inches high, and he ate there sitting cross-legged. Moslem women glided like Cyclopian ghosts through the streets while (comparatively) brazen Jewish women showed both eyes and even their entire faces. Jewish men, constrained by law to wear black, were forced to walk barefoot whenever they passed the street outside a mosque. The slave market sold whites as well as blacks. The sounds of Arabic, Turkish, Greek, Italian, and Lingua Franca collided in the streets.
During his second week there, Ray, returning from drawing water, passed through the main city gate when he saw a hand and a foot hanging from a wall “fresh bleeding.” Ray noticed a crowd gathering and walked over. “The object of their curiosity was a wretch with his left hand and right foot recently amputated, faint and almost expiring . . . the stumps had been dipped in boiling pitch.” Ray failed to learn the man’s crime, but he discovered this extreme punishment was not rare. “You will see a great number of men in Tripoli hobbling about the street thus mutilated.”
How a man reacts to his enslavement reveals much about his character. Some prisoners were meek and obsequious to the guards; others refused even to doff their caps and took a beating for it. Ray, a somewhat despondent bookish man, was amazed by the upbeat behavior of most of the crew. The ones forced to work repairing Philadelphia smuggled salt pork back to their friends. (The meat was gnawed raw then swallowed, and hunger made it taste “delicious.”) And Ray observed that the American sailors, now slaves, “would caper, sing, jest, and look as cheerful, many of them, as if they had been at a feast or wedding.”
But when Ray soon learned details of the officers’ lives in captivity, he was infuriated. (In truth, it didn’t take much to infuriate Ray.) The officers, staying at the spacious former American consulate, had an ample diet of meat and fruits. They did not have to work. Bainbridge quickly arranged a line of credit through the kindly Danish consul, Nicholas Nissen, who also supplied the officers with blankets, provisions, books, paper, ink, quills. (Few, if any, of the navy men realized that it was William Eaton’s generosity in brokering the return at face value of six Danish ships captured by Tunis in 1801 that had first kindled the friendship of Denmark.)
While the officers had plenty of food and leisure time, they were hampered in one regard. They lacked clothes, since most of their uniforms had been stolen. The foreign minister of Tripoli, in an apparent show of sympathy, offered to find their uniforms and return them. Mohammed Dghies did in fact locate twelve trunks and he offered to deliver them for . . . $1,500, payable over time. The officers declined. And Jewish merchants also tracked down jackets and trousers and shirts, but their prices were so “enormous,” in the words of one officer, that few bothered to buy their own clothes back.
Physical comforts, helpful Danes, bottles of Madeira, however, could not wash away their frustration and disappointment over what had happened to their frigate. From the first moment of captivity, Captain William Bainbridge was tormented by his surrender. From the roof, he could see Philadelphia. On the very first day, he wrote an extraordinary letter to his wife in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, one that would not arrive for almost six months. While his navigational and leadership skills might be questioned, William Bainbridge here shows himself as an articulate, at times eloquent, letter writer, and a master at shaping a tale.
My Dear Susan,
With feelings of distress which I cannot describe, I have to inform you, that I have lost the beautiful frigate which was placed under my command, by running her a-foul of rocks, a few miles to the east of this harbour, which are not marked on any charts. After defending her as long as a ray of hope remained, I was obliged to surrender, and am now with officers and crew confined in a prison in this place.
My anxiety and affliction does not arise from my confinement and deprivations in prison—these, indeed, I could bear if ten times more severe; but is caused by my absence, which may be a protracted one, from my dearly beloved Susan; and an apprehension which constantly haunts me, that I may be censured by my countrymen. These impressions, which are seldom absent from my mind, act as a corroding canker at my heart. So maddened am I sometimes by the workings of my imagination, that I cannot refrain from exclaiming that it would have been a merciful dispensation of Providence if my head had been shot off by the enemy, while our vessel lay rolling on the rocks.
You now see, my beloved wife, the cause of my distress—my situation in prison is entirely supportable—I have found here kind and generous friends, such as I hope the virtuous will meet in all situations; but if my professional character be blotched—if an attempt be made to taint my honour—if I am censured, if it does not kill me, it would at least deprive me of the power of looking any of my race in the face, always excepting, however, my young, kind and sympathizing wife. If the world desert me, I am sure to find a welcome in her arms—in her affection, to receive the support and condolence which none others can give.
I cannot tell why I am so oppressed with apprehension—I am sure I acted according to my best judgement—my officers tell me, that my conduct was faultless—that no one indeed could have done better but this I attribute, (perhaps in my weakness) to a generous wish on their part to sustain me in my affliction.
I hope soon to hear that your health is good, and although grieved at my misfortune, are yet surrounded by dear and condoling friends, who will in some measure assuage your affliction. Perhaps, too, you will be able to tell me, that I have done injustice to my countrymen—that so far from censuring, they sympathize, and some even applaud me. God grant that this may be the case—and why should it not? The Americans are generous as they are brave. I must stop, my dear wife, for I see I am disclosing my weakness—these are the mere reveries which daily pass through my heated brain.
I beg that you will not suppose our imprisonment is attended with suffering—on the contrary, it is, as I have already assured you, quite a supportable state.
Your ever faithful and affectionate husband,
William Bainbridge
While Bainbridge tried to ward off the dark thoughts, one of the crewmen found his own situation unbearable and tried to commit suicide. Charles Rhilander, a merchant seaman from Boston, had survived shipwreck off Portugal only to be duped into boarding the Philadelphia with the promise of a free trip home. He had refused to enlist and swore to abandon ship at the next port; now instead he was a slave. He tried to slash his own throat but was so drunk, according to William Ray, that he inflicted “a mere scratch.”
Map (circa 1802) of Tripoli harbor. No reef is marked in the lower left corner near the numeral 20 (fathoms deep) where the Philadelphia beached.
The crewmen continued their routine of hard work (building walls), little food (black bread and oil), and sleeping on the floor. Everyone knew that ransom might take months or years, but they also knew that there existed a simple way for the men to become free immediately, and that was to convert to Islam. Less than three weeks into captivity, John Wilson, a quartermaster born in Sweden, decided to turn Turk, as did Thomas Prince, a seventeen-year-old from Rhode Island. Three more Americans would soon follow them.
The officials of Tripoli, who encouraged and allowed the religious conversion, took the matter seriously. Since the Koran forbids Moslems from enslaving Moslems, a conversion meant freedom from slavery. As Ray put it, “Thomas Prince was metamorphosed from a Christian to a Turk.” His choice of the word metamorphosed was quite apt. Not only did the ritual involve words of faith and promises to perform new rituals, but also a change of clothes and that inevitable loss of foreskin. While circumcision is not mentioned in the Koran (as it is in the Old Testament, Genesis 17:11), the rite became sanctified by Moslem theologians as far back as the seventh and eighth centuries.
A traveler to Morocco around this time was allowed to watch a public circumcision, and his account reveals some aspects of what the five “turn-Turk” sailors must have experienced. Wrote Ali Bey,
The boy was then brought forward, and immediately seized by the strong-armed man who . . . lifted up the gown of the child, and presented him to the operator. At this moment the music (flutes and drums) began to sound with its loudest noise; and the children, who were seated behind the ministers, started suddenly up and shouted with great vociferation to attract the attention of the victim, and by the motions of their fingers, directed his eyes to the roof of the chapel. Stunned with all the noise, the child lifted up its head; and that very moment the officiating priest laid hold of the prepuce, and pulling it with force, clipped it off with one motion of his scissors. Another immediately threw a little astringent powder on the wound, and a third covered it with lint, which he tied on by a bandage; and the child was carried away.
In the nineteenth century, a French anthropologist noted that Moslem circumcision in North Africa usually involved the removal of far more outer skin than among the Jews. (The Bedouin performed the circumcision rite at puberty and called it es-selkh, or “the flaying.”)
No accounts reveal anything specific about the clipping of the five U.S. Navy sailors. Although the five men were nominally free and didn’t bunk with the prisoners, they were not allowed to leave Tripoli. They took paying jobs in town. John Wilson, in Moslem garb, would become one of the harshest overseers of the prisoners. His former shipmates despised him. “He . . . acted as a spy carrying to the Bashaw every frivolous and a thousand false tales,” wrote Ray. The first lie he told was that Captain Bainbridge was planning an escape; his next was that Bainbridge had dropped nineteen boxes of dollars and a huge sack of gold overboard just before surrendering. Bainbridge very much wanted Wilson hanged as a deserter.
Week by week the men, as they settled into their new lives as slaves, caught glimpses of Bashaw Yussef, and he was always seen in a regal pose. Pomp was de rigueur on the Barbary Coast. “His majesty was mounted on a milk white mare, sumptuously caparisoned and glittering with golden trappings,” wrote Ray about November 8 when Yussef came to the prison. “At his right hand rode a huge negro . . . he was followed and attended by his Mamelukes.” Slaves held colorful umbrellas over the heads of his children.
But behind the glittering facade, life was not quite as elegant and easy as the impressive-looking Bashaw tried to make it seem. Although Allah had dropped the Philadelphia into his lap, his treasury was almost empty, and he was threatened from within by a bloody rebellion in the southern province of Gharian and by another one led by his rival brother, Hamet, in the rich eastern provinces of Derne and Bengazi. His behavior was becoming more erratic under these strains.
The following incident, which occurred that month—recorded by Dutch consul Zuchet—reveals both the ruthlessness and the superstitiousness of the trans-Atlantic foe of Thomas Jefferson. Yussef had convinced the nation’s holiest marabout to negotiate a truce in Gharian, an inland city.
With the sacred promise of the divine marabout, the chief of the rebels was conducted before Yussef, garotted, tied at the neck by a piece of rope, a sign of his desire to repent. The Bashaw granted him immunity . . . but overwhelmed more by a desire for vengeance than respect for his own parole, he secretly ordered three loyal citizens of Gharian to murder the rebel chief. The marabout negotiator, informed of this assassination, knew immediately that no one other than the Bashaw would have dared attack a person whom the dervish had protected.
The dervish rushed to the Bashaw and predicted all kinds of calamities and he uttered the most extreme threats and swore never again to see him. . . . The next day, the three loyal citizens arrived to receive their reward for their mission. The Bashaw, always afraid of the holy man’s threats, thought that their deaths would somehow appease him and decided these three loyal followers should be hanged; his orders were immediately executed.
The Bashaw learned he had not at all assuaged the dervish; he grew convinced that he would lose his throne. Along with his family and his entourage, he traveled a half day’s march into the desert to find the dervish. Many black sheep were sacrificed to expiate his crimes. Two long hours elapsed before the Bashaw was allowed into the presence of the holy man. Finally he was permitted to see him in a room; the holy man was completely naked, his hair like snakes, making the leaps and gestures of a maniac. He delivered to him the following rude speech: “The Bashaw must respect promises made to an apostle of their Prophet, who alone is able to dethrone him and if he allows him to rule, it is because for the time he knows of no other person more fit to rule.” The Bashaw kissed the hand of the dervish and returned a bit more tranquil.
To prove his remorse, he said he wanted no more to do with the province of Gharian, and he abandoned all rights and revenues to the Dervish who from now on could dispose of it as he liked.
Thus, Yussef had on a whim executed four people. The giving away of the rebellious region was actually shrewd: The costs in blood and money exceeded the tax revenues. The Dutch diplomat concluded his report with another tidbit of information. The Bashaw now planned to focus on getting rid of his brother, Hamet, who had come to Derne and Bengazi to raise a civil war.
Yussef, with an army assembled and superior weapons, had every reason to believe that he would soon succeed in ousting Hamet. The one factor Yussef didn’t count on was the enthusiastic support that Hamet would receive from a defiant American from Brimfield, Massachusetts.